CTO-gate: Smoke Gets In Our Eyes.

To Good To Be True? Derek Handley, an old friend; someone of her generation; superbly qualified for a job that needs to be filled by someone sympathetic to her government’s aims and objectives; on his way back to settle permanently in New Zealand; gets in touch via her own party’s president. Why would Jacinda Ardern be suspicious? Where would the harm be in letting him have her private, private e-mail address?

THE BIG QUESTION is, can they pull it off? Can the National Party do to Jacinda Ardern what Labour tried, but failed, to do to John Key: destroy their opponents’ most powerful political asset? The slightly smaller question is: If this is National’s intention, then how deep does the conspiracy go?

In this morning’s edition (27/9/18) of Politik, Richard Harman reveals that, on Monday night, PR maven and former National Party president, Michelle Boag, contacted Politik and asked for its e-mail address. Within 24 hours, Harman reports, copies of Derek Handley’s e-mail messages and text conversations with Jacinda and her hapless minister, Clare Curran, had arrived in the website’s e-mailbox.

Put these facts together with Winston Peters statement, made in the House of Representatives, that Boag is working for Handley, and a number of troubling questions present themselves.

The first and the most obvious: Is it Handley’s intention to do political harm to his “friend” – Jacinda Ardern?

It certainly looks as though damaging the Prime Minister’s reputation is exactly what he’s trying to do. Why else would he release his electronic communications with Jacinda while she is in America? It is difficult to imagine he could be unaware of the effect his release of this information would have on what was shaping-up as a triumphal progress through the UN auditoria and television studios of New York.

That Handley might be angry with Jacinda is understandable. The position of Chief Technology Officer had been given to him – only to be snatched away without warning following the fall of Curran. It is entirely plausible that a person in his position would be feeling aggrieved and anxious to have people know the full story.

But why would Handley involve Boag in the process? Especially when he has his own PR adviser, Julie Landry, to handle the release of such material. Boag, in conformity with her long-standing policy, has refused to confirm or deny whether Handley is her client. It is, however, difficult – given her call to Politik – to form a more plausible conclusion.

And it’s here that the questions begin to go dark: especially for those with a conspiratorial turn of mind; because, immediately, the suspicion looms that the whole Handley-for-CTO exercise may have been an elaborate set-up.

Clare Curran was not, when all is said and done, the most robust minister in Jacinda Ardern’s Cabinet. If one was looking for a politician to weave a complicated plot around, Clare would be hard to go past.

What’s more, all those National Party MPs with cabinet experience are well aware of how useful it can be to have a private, back-channel means of communicating with friends and allies. Not every person who ministers meet, and not everything they need to talk to them about, is the sort of information they want all-and-sundry scrutinising in their official ministerial diaries. For people new to high office, the temptation to direct friends and allies past the official gatekeepers (and diary managers) is very strong. Entangling Curran in a web of unwise communications would not be all that difficult: indeed, with a bit of luck she would do it all by herself. National had only to ask the right questions and file the appropriate OIA requests.

And it’s right about here that the truly nagging doubt arises. Did our millennial Prime Minister; one of a generation for whom personal networking has become second-nature; someone who lives on and through her devices; fail to perceive the risks of continuing to work that way in an environment where every form of communication is recoverable – and may be used in evidence against her?

An old friend; someone of her generation; superbly qualified for a job that needs to be filled by someone sympathetic to her government’s aims and objectives; on his way back to settle permanently in New Zealand; gets in touch via her own party’s president. Why would she be suspicious? Where would the harm be in letting him have her private, private e-mail address?

Unless. Unless. Unless. No, the Nats just aren’t that clever – are they? Actually, some of them – Michelle Boag in particular – are extremely clever. Chess players from way back and as unforgiving as an executioner’s axe. More importantly, they have a target with only a fraction of the protection Key possessed. The “System” supplied the Prime Minister from Merrill Lynch with the sort of impenetrable political body armour the Prime Minister from the International Union of Socialist Youth can only dream about.

When Mike Williams flew across the Tasman in search of dirt on John Key, he could not be at all certain that, even if he found it, Key’s friends in the upper echelons of the mainstream news media would use it. Boag knows full well that National can rely upon a cabal of very senior political journalists and commentators to blow the smallest misstep by Jacinda Ardern into a full-blown decline-and-fall epic. She also knows that, contrary to Nietzsche’s claims, attacks which fail to kill politicians do not make them stronger – they make them weaker. The voters cannot see smoke without thinking of fire. Blow enough smoke in their eyes and they stop seeing clearly.

And that is all the National Opposition needs.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 28 September 2018.

Online Voting? Not If You Value Democracy!

And Where It Goes Nobody Knows: Security issues aside, Online Voting strikes at the inescapably collectivist character of the democratic process. Reducing the act of voting to the electronic identification of a purely individual preference replaces the active "us" of participatory democracy with the crass solipsism of reality television and The X Factor.

 

DEREK HANDLEY bubbles over with faith in the future. As a precocious inductee to the Silicon Alley Hall of Fame, he is blazingly confident that capitalism, information technology and the entrepreneurial spirit are never going to encounter a challenge they cannot rise to – or overcome.

 

Like the failure of close to half of New Zealand citizens aged under 30 to engage in the electoral process.

 

On this subject Mr Handley is typically forthright:

 

“Everybody under 30 has grown up with the internet and mobile devices to do practically everything online yet they still can’t vote online. [This has resulted] in an entire generation being pushed to the sidelines of democracy not because they don’t care, but because it hasn’t kept up with them.”

 

Setting aside Mr Handley’s bubbly confidence in all things “online”, this is utter tosh. An “entire generation” has not been “pushed to the sidelines of democracy”, they have ambled there entirely of their own accord. Not only do they not “care” about democracy, but an alarming number of them would also struggle to tell you what it is.

 

Far from democracy failing to keep up with the needs of the younger generation, one out of every two New Zealanders under 30 has failed conspicuously to keep up with the most fundamental facts of political life.

 

The most important of these is that politics (and elections) are activities to be participated in collectively – not individually. The moment this central fact of political life is forgotten, the logic of participation collapses in on itself.

 

A recent article by Fairfax journalists Paul Easton and Simon Day vividly illustrates what happens when the prospect of casting a vote is viewed through an individualistic, as opposed to a collectivist, lens.

 

Asked why he didn’t vote, Johnny, aged 20, and described simply as “dad”, declared:

 

“I didn’t see the point. My life is good as it is. I don’t like John Key, but I thought he was going to get in anyway so I didn’t vote. I would vote if it meant getting stuff I was keen for.”

 

Would anyone vote, I wonder, if they looked at their ballot paper in this way? Unless the respective political blocs were registering 50.000 percent to 50.000 percent, what possible difference could the casting of a single ballot ever make?

 

As for the naked appeal to self-enrichment: in which democracy is turned into one of those “goody-bags” that public relations firms and party hostesses pass out; it is difficult to conceive of a sentence which sums up more succinctly the tragically distorted values of Mr Handley’s side-lined generation.

 

Hey Kids! Want stuff that your keen for? Just slide your ballot paper into this box. See? Easy-peasy! Have a nice day!

 

Would digitising the process, as Mr Handley urges, solve the problem? Of course not. If anything, it would make it worse.

 

Online Voting represents the ultimate step towards individualising – and hence trivialising and debasing – the collective act of voting in elections. Even more than it does now, the conduct of politics would come to resemble a television show. The nation’s political future would be decided by a slightly less revved-up version of The X Factor. (With Mike Hosking playing the part of Simon Cowell!)

 

But, of course, the “kids” would soon get bored. The contestants would be too old, too ugly and too serious to hold their attention for more than one “season” of the “show” – if that. Having sampled the “Politics” app, and been disappointed, they’d move on to something more exciting – like “Tinder”.

 

Which means, Mr Handley, that it would all have been for nothing. Whatever slight upward tick in participation the initial introduction of Online Voting might produce would soon dissipate – just as the “beneficial” effects of Postal Voting all-too-rapidly faded away.

 

Even worse, we would have traded a system of voting that is admirably secure and extremely difficult to subvert (without “the fix” very quickly becoming obvious) for a system that could be hacked into as easily as the “Guardians of Peace” hacked into the hard-drives of Sony Pictures. The crucial difference being that we’d never know it had happened.

 

That five minute stroll to the nearest polling-booth every three years is one of the very few opportunities for meaningful civic engagement still available to New Zealanders. The sight of black and white, women and men, old and young collectively determining the future of their nation never fails to move me to tears. Because those people, my fellow citizens, are not voting for themselves, or for “stuff” they might be “keen for”. They know that their single ballot paper will not, of itself, make very much difference. But that’s not the point. The point is that out of the great and mysterious gestalt of democracy a decision emerges – and it is ours.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 6 January 2014.